transcript fc expert blog podcast with sonoa systems

8/14/2019 Transcript FC Expert Blog Podcast With Sonoa Systems

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Transcr ipt of FC Expert Blog Podcast

September 9, 2009

The following is a transcript of a Fast Company FC Expert Blog podcast with Lena

West – “Helping Companies Take on “the Cloud” , an interview with Sonoa CEO

Chet Kapoor and Scott Regan, VP marketing.

This is Lena West…Scott Regan and Chet Kapoor…welcome guys.

Scott : Hi, Lena. Thanks for the time.

You’ve got a great company…tell us what you do?

Scott : Absolutely. We provide visibility, control and scalability for feeds,

APIs and Cloud services. That’s the one-liner. The context is around

the emerging trend of Cloud computing - companies opening up their

assets in new creative ways like what you see with the Facebook platform

or with Software-as-a-Service or 40,000 iPhone apps. This is quickly

becoming mainstream for large companies that want to take advantage of

Cloud services or open up their assets through APIs, or use more

software as a service or distribute their content through feeds.

What we do at Sonoa is allow them to jump in with both feet and still

adhere to all of the compliance, security and customer satisfaction

requirements that they have; to use these types of services and take

advantage of this opportunity but in a way that’s going to let them do it




September 9, 2009

in an enterprise-class manner, if that makes sense.

Absolutely…they come to you…they’re the idea people…you help them to

execute…in a safe way and measureable.

Scott : That’s right. We have a technology that enforces their policies on

their traffic so that they can adhere to things like compliance and

security.

Sure.

Scott : one of our customers - TrueCredit, the – the TransUnion company

- are opening some of their core services - things like credit reporting – to

partners to build their own applications. And, they, of course, want to

give their partners these capabilities through APIs or application

programming interfaces. First, they want to make sure that they have

visibility in the traffic - what’s moving in and out of the cloud between

them and their partners. Who are the customers with a lot of activity?

Who are the ones with less activity?

Second, they also want to make sure that they adhere to their security

and compliance policies. They want to make sure no sensitive customer

data gets exposed that shouldn’t.




September 9, 2009

And third, they also want to make sure that it’s performs really, really

well. So things like, performance and scale and caching. In Cloud

computing, you could have thousands and thousands of clients that are

using a service. So making sure it’s a – a really robust, healthy service.

They deploy our technology between their APIs or services and their

partners, and we enforce all of these things on the traffic so that they can

offer this as a service to make more money or to harvest new partnership

opportunities. Does that make sense?

Absolutely…the work you’re doing with MTV Networks...what’s that

about?

Scott : That’s a really interesting use case. If you think about media

companies like an MTV or Warner Music, they have a lot of content and

they want to distribute to new media partners in really, customized,

innovative ways. So for example, they might want to distribute one set of

content to YouTube and another set of content to MSN, another set of

content to AOL and so on and so forth. And they may want to have

dozens of – of content channels that they syndicate - information through

RSS feeds, which is just another flavor of API, really.




September 9, 2009

We help MTV provide content channels to different partners, and to

provision these channels very quickly and efficiently, and provide some of

the same things we talked about like making sure there are no broken

links and – and that they’re fast through caching, to make sure that the

end customer has a great experience. Does that make sense?

Absolutely…what is driving all of the corporate enterprise interest in

Cloud computing…security…?

Scott : Sure. Well, it’s – the – it’s an emerging trend that’s really

experiencing the transition between early adoption and – and becoming

mainstream. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but a really notable one is

the economic environment. Cloud computing is a great weapon for

innovative, aggressive companies to capitalize on some new

opportunities – such as selling existing assets through software as a

service as a new way to drive revenue.

We’re all looking for new ways to drive revenue in today’s economic

climate or appeal to new segments of customers if other segments aren’t

doing so well. But, you know, of course, everybody’s familiar with Cloud

computing as a great way to rework costs, which everybody’s doing now

because, software as a service can be much more cost-effective to




September 9, 2009

incorporate into your environment than building everything yourself or –

or buying everything for on-premise.

So there’s a lot of things driving this trend - making it easier to do Cloud

computing -but certainly we’ve seen an uptick. And while the recession’s

not good for anybody, it’s been an accelerant if anything for a lot of these

companies opening up.

But you want to make sure that if you’re running a business, you don’t

expose customer information to the wrong party as you’re moving

information in and out of your firewall to the cloud, so to speak. So

making sure that you have really rock solid screening of sensitive data.

Or access control. You know, it you’ve got thousands and thousands of

customers accessing your service, which is a great problem to have, but

making sure that you have a way to efficiently administer the right fine-

grain levels of access control to different customers is really, really

important. So security is one of the – the first things that customers

think about when doing this. And they also think about compliance.

Can I pass the SOX audit or HIPAA compliance?

Gotcha…was that you, Chet?




September 9, 2009

Chet : The one additional think I would say, Lena, is I think everybody

knows about the cost benefit, and Scott talked about it and they look at

analytics and they want control from a security perspective whether it’s

authentication or whether it’s data masking because you’d want to be

compliant and not go into an orange jumpsuit.

The thing that I find is a dirty little secret of Cloud computing among

almost all the customers that we interact with that are adopting Cloud

computing is that they are using the cost-benefit analysis to drive the

discussion so that they can do it, but what’s motivating them behind the

scenes is time to market.

Yes, absolutely. I agree… because that’s a bottom line thing.

Chet : Absolutely. What ends up happening is you talk to them and say,

why are you doing this? Large banks, large insurance companies who

are going off and saying - let me do applications that require some

elasticity as long as we can use some technology like Sonoa to

authenticate as well as to make sure that we’re not out of compliance -

because doing those same projects through their normal procedure

would take them about five times as long.




September 9, 2009

And that’s a generous estimate…

Chet : Absolutely. I was having lunch with one of our customers in New

York on Tuesday, and his take was, Chet, - one of the reasons I’m doing

Cloud computing is because I just want to get our ops team in shape. I

want them to know that there’s an alternative, and if they don’t get their

act together, more and more of this stuff is going to start going outside.

Absolutely…time to market is a driver…how to not make the same

mistakes in the past…retain some measure of control?

Chet : So, Lena, you must have read my blog.

No. Sorry. Is that bad to admit?

Chet : You know, coming from the enterprise background and watching

the web unfold in front of us, right, it’s been very interesting. Let me go

back to experiences of the past.

Chet: Think about all the WS-* standards that were created between

IBM, Microsoft, and BEA, while I was at BEA. They’re complex. They’ve

been adopted, but they’re not proliferated throughout. And then look at

the de facto standards that have come about like the REST style of doing

things.




September 9, 2009

Right.

Chet : And that has become a de facto standard. There’s been no

standards body. I mean, it makes sense, so you adopt it and you move

forward.

One of the things that I’ve been talking to our customers about is - when

you find a standards body that actually makes sense, please involve

yourself and drive because if you leave it to vendors, they have a built-in

interest to go off and try to have some kind of lock in.

Absolutely. To secure their business.

Chet : Absolutely. Because if it’s all standard, then it’s all a commodity,

and we haven’t seen that yet in the computing industry. But if you do

get involved, and forget the lock in part, you somehow keep it simple.

Don’t make it complex. Don’t let the vendors be vendors.

But if you keep the standard simple and focus on the 80 percent use

cases, not the corner use cases, that by itself will be a huge leap forward

from anything standards-oriented that you’ve done in the enterprise

space for the last 20 years.

When one use case that doesn’t fit…what ifs…does that happen most of




September 9, 2009

the time?

Chet : So the one we think that does show some promise, that we are

getting involved with and that we are more importantly encouraging a lot

of our customers to get involved with is the Cloud security alliance.

Yes, CSA.

Chet : And – and so, we have, quite a few of our customers involved,

already and we’re introducing more and more folks to it, and my take

that is I hope it’s a customer-dominated, alliance organization or a

standardization body than something that vendors drive.

Awesome… …how do we make sure that software as a service doesn’t go

the way of the ASP model…?

Chet : I think we don’t have to worry about that –

Really? Okay.

Chet: Oh, absolutely. Let me give you the three stages I’ve seen of – of

software as a service. You know, it used to be if you were a small

company, you couldn’t afford to hire a system administrator, so you

either wrote, small applications in Microsoft Access or in Filemaker if




September 9, 2009

you were a Mac shop. And then when you grew up, you bought some

real software and you installed it and things like that. That was the first

stage.

So the first stage of SaaS was when only small companies adopted it.

The second stage of SaaS was when CIOs were under the age of 40 were

adopting it, right? Just because, you know, you were young. You kinda,

sorta grew up on the web and you’re like, you know, why not? This

makes a lot of sense and these guys tell me that there’s – the data’s going

to be secure, so let me not worry about it. But that was the phase t

about three years ago. I think we’re in the mainstream of SaaS now. I

would be hard-pressed to find any organization, any organization out

there that, medium or large that does not do SaaS already on some form.

Wow…that’s a statement.

Chet: Any organization - take the most conservative organization that

you want, some way or form, they are doing SaaS. That doesn’t mean

they’re running an ERP on SaaS, but they might be doing Salesforce.

They might be doing some marketing automation. They might be doing

expenses. Some way or form, there’s some SaaS happening in

organizations.




September 9, 2009

So I think the adoption part – there’s enough momentum that it’s just –

it’ll just happen. I do not believe it’s going to go back to, “oh, you know

what? This thing is not real. Let me just go back to on-premise.” I

don’t think we have to worry about that.

Awesome…good news.

Chet : I think your question’s a good one but the penetration is not all

the way there yet, right? People are not saying I’ll do SaaS for

everything, and I’m not sure, by the way, that they will get there. There’s

some things that make a lot of sense to just have on premise, especially

if you spend a hundred million dollars implementing an SAP in –

instance, right? They’re not going to rip that out.

No…not as long as it still works…

Chet : Exactly. I mean, it took long enough and took enough years,

enough money to get it to work, right?

Absolutely. If it works, don’t touch it…not spent money in vain…

Chet : Correct.

You know, it’s – it’s very interesting. You had asked this question earlier

about Cloud computing and security, Lena.




September 9, 2009

The emotional aspect of a CIO saying, I have built and run a power plant,

and now I’m going to get an outlet and just going to plug something in is

– is actually quite significant. The good news is that they are being –

they’re being eased into it, right? It was SaaS first and now it’s more

Infrastructure-as–a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service. And have

another decade, or two decades to get through that transition, but the

really smart CIOs are saying, I’m going to not fear this. I’m going to

embrace it and use it as a stick to shape up my organization. And my

belief is that Cloud computing will make IT more strategic because it’ll

have them focus on things that are important to them as a business.

Like the CIO at MTV Networks or at Guardian Insurance or at TrueCredit

should focus on what does it take to make TrueCredit more competitive

vis-a-vis their competitors rather than focus on, you know, is – “do I get

best power rates in Portland or in Iowa?” Let somebody else worry about

that because that is their business. Your business is credit reports;

focus on that.

Right…

Chet: But there will be an emotional rollercoaster that people will go

through, right? I may lose jobs.




September 9, 2009

Are you saying…possibly the adoption of cloud computing could be one

way, maybe not the way…CIO make their way to the strategic seat at the

table…?

Chet : Absolutely, and I think it’s already happening. In many places, it

is already happening, but they’ll still be responsible for the telephone

service and the Internet service and datacenters and things like that,

right? Even if you have – even if you work with someone like Amazon or

Google or IBM, you’re still responsible for it, but you’re not spending

your time worrying about it because you have SLAs.

Gotcha…

Chet: Right? Just like you don’t – I mean, you – you are responsible for

power in your house, right? But you don’t worry about how the power

plant is running.

Right. Absolutely.

Chet : And so I think it’ll free them up to think more about business

issues.

That’s a good point…helps to solve the day-to-day technician role…think

about IT as a business within a company.




September 9, 2009

Chet : Correct.

Absolutely…

Chet : I mean, technology is an enabler for True Credit, as an example,

right? It is not their business. It is – it is Google and Sonoa System’s

and everybody else’s business, right? Their business is credit reports.

Chet : You know, different people are going to take Cloud computing in a

different way because, you know, SaaS was fine, but now when

infrastructure starts becoming outsourced or goes out in the Cloud, that

makes people really nervous.

Absolutely…CIOs have had steps…smart ones are starting to see they

must adopt and adapt…that’s what makes them competitive.

Chet : Absolutely.

Scott : And our mission is to make sure that as they do it, we make them

feel comfortable they have the visibility, security, control and the scale

for which they’re trying to do it. As you go and embark on this journey,

we can make sure that you have visibility on what’s going in and out of




September 9, 2009

your firewall as well as we give you some kind of control and security of

what is going in and out, and you’re not breaking any laws when you’re

doing it.

And performance is top notch.

Scott : And performance is top notch.

Shift a little to your company…Cloud is new on the scene…how are you

different from other companies in this realm?

Scott : Well, one thing we do that’s different and that’s probably

indicative of another interesting trend to discuss is it’s not just the

technology, the capability of what we do, but it’s how customers can get

it.

One thing that we’ve found in the last year is that customers may feel

strongly about wanting our technology employed on premise. It could

be hardware appliance if they’re doing a ton of traffic. It could be a

virtual appliance if they have a fully virtualized on-premise environment.

Or they may say, hey, you know, I want to do this out in the Cloud. I

want to get started, up and running in two weeks. I expect this to be




September 9, 2009

delivered as a subscription service. So, the thing that we do that’s a little

different is - we can deliver it to you however you want it.

If you want it as a Cloud service, you can be up and running in two

weeks. If you want to take it in-house, a couple months later - you can

do that. If you want to go vice versa, you can do that.

We’re also seeing hybrid models where customers are thinking that they

want some part of their infrastructure - and our technology - deployed

in-house – but they still want to have some capacity that’s elastic out in

the Cloud. Especially if they have seasonal flux or high demand.

So, one interesting thing that we’ve learned in the last year or so is that it

– it can be really advantageous to be able to tell a customer that they can

have their choice or a hybrid delivery model in how they consume our

technology.

Absolutely…that’s a huge difference…have it your way…smart…

Chet : If you think about the DNA of our company - we actually solved

this from a bottom-up perspective. So we very much focused on making

sure the scale was significantly there and the feature set is very rich and




September 9, 2009

very large, and so that gives our enterprise customers very much a

sense that this is an enterprise-level platform. It has the ease of use of a

web environment, but it has the – the reliability, availability, scalability of

an enterprise environment. So we brought these two together and as we

go in and talk to the web companies, they like the fact that we have

enterprise qualities. And the enterprise companies really like the fact

that, you know, we have ease of use of a web product.

Awesome…what’s next for Sonoa Systems…?

Chet : That’s, –

Put you on the spot, right? What can you tell us…?

Chet : I think what you’re seeing from us is the – is the tip of the iceberg.

We have customers that are starting out with, you know, one or two

projects and are making us more and more strategic as part of it. We

culturally have a way of getting in and solving customer problems for

them and letting – letting them talk on our behalf, and that actually

helps us a lot. So, a lot more to come is probably the way to say it. Lots

and lots of innovation that we’ve not talked about yet, Lena.

Well, I’m looking forward to subscribing and reading your blog…a good




September 9 2009

place to start, right?

Chet : I will specifically send you the standards piece because I want to

make sure my colleagues from the enterprise software space don’t make

the same mistakes that we we’ve made before.

Awesome…I’ll link to it… Thanks so much, Chet. Thanks, Scott.

Chet : All right. Thank you very, very much.

Scott : Thank you.

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